Cabanes de santé

In 1629 the plague haunts the streets of Annecy. The Jardins de l’Europe were but a vast swamp where cabins were set up to confine the sick. Almost 400 years later, Alexis Campagne stirs up that memory in the cheerful form of his scented health cabins (Cabanes de santé).

Made of wood as their forerunners probably were, but open and welcoming as their forerunners most certainly weren’t, these structures evoke those cabins and their history while joyously spreading good health. They are actually planters filled with medicinal herbs (called “simples” in French in the Middle Ages) to assuage minor everyday ills: lavender, valerian, lemon verbena, St. John’s wort and more. These mini-gardens are designed to be discovered leaf by leaf and to become a place for communication, a chance to transmit a surprising lesson rooted in this park’s forgotten history. Centuries later, in this spot so changed by time, let yourself be charmed by these herbs’ ancestral scents.

Born in 1990, Alexis Campagne lives in Lille (France) and is working toward a degree in landscape design at École nationale supérieure de paysage in Versailles. Guided by the conviction that art and landscape can help repair the disintegrated social fabric, he tries to turn each of his installation sites into a truly public place. In 2021 he won the Jardins du monde en mouvement (Paris) competition.